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Jameson and NASA Fellows Selected

AHA Staff, September 2008

The American Historical Association is pleased to announce the names of the scholars who have been awarded the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Fellowship for 2008–09.

The Jameson Fellowship, tenable at the Library of Congress has been awarded to Peter S. Leavenworth.

Leavenworth, who received his PhD from the University of New Hampshire in early American History in 2007, will use his fellowship tenure to expand his research into the history of early American music business. His dissertation, "Accounting For Taste: The Early American Music Business and Secularization in Music Aesthetics, 1720–1825," concentrated on changes within and interaction between sacred and theater music in the early American republic. Conflicting tastes of practitioners of religious music and secularizing influences from a newly imported urban theater milieu created a series of reforms and consumption patterns that altered the way Americans thought about music. These public and private debates were carried out in diaries, letters, tune book prefaces, newspapers, and magazines and reflected larger theological, economic, and political divisions in an evolving American culture. Leavenworth demonstrates how postcolonial elements of these transformations complicate our understanding of early national cultural formation.

The NASA Fellowship for 2008–09 was awarded to Jenifer Van Vleck.

Van Vleck is a PhD candidate at Yale University. She studies the United States in the twentieth century, focusing on the cultural history of U.S. foreign relations. This year, she will be completing her dissertation, "No Distant Places: Commercial Aviation and American Globalism, 1915–1968." Van Vleck argues that aviation inspired a globalist imagination—a way of visualizing the world and the United States' place within it—that proved critical to the ascendance of the United States as a world power. Based on research in ten archives, her project engages with scholarship on empire, nationalism, consumer culture, and globalization. Contributing to the "transnational turn" in historiography, Van Vleck's dissertation uses the history of aviation to examine how the very categories of the national and the global have acquired meaning.